Mike Celizic

MIAMI - Tony Dungy kept repeating his philosophy of life and football so often, you finally had no choice but to believe him when he said that even the biggest game in American sports doesn’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things.

The fact that the observation is correct doesn’t mean you want to hear the coach of a Super Bowl team tossing it out to be gobbled up by the microphones and notepads at the game’s big media feeding.

But that was Dungy’s message — “It is a big game, [but] it’s not life or death.”

Whether that message translates into a win remains to be seen, but it makes you wonder about how the Colts are approaching this game.

Dungy is a dedicated family man who drives his kids to school before going to work. He also is telling his players to enjoy this week with their families, to take in Miami and the scene and everything around the game, because for the majority of people who play the game, the Super Bowl is a never-in-a-lifetime experience, and those who do get there may never get there again.

Only the game will tell if Dungy’s right. And if the Colts win, you’re going to see every team making Super Bowl week a family excursion and every coach telling his players to take some time off from work to have a little fun.

But if they don’t win, the door’s wide open to question whether they were beaten by a superior Bears team or by an inferior attitude toward the game.

Some people will blame Dungy, who, like his quarterback, Peyton Manning, is saddled with the rap of never winning the big game. Dungy breathed life and respect into a Tampa Bay franchise that had been one of the league’s most miserable, but he couldn’t get the team to the Super Bowl. Ultimately, he lost his job over that, and the man who replaced him, Jon Gruden, promptly went to the Super Bowl and won it in his first season.

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In Indianapolis, Dungy has turned out one of the best and most consistent regular-season teams — maybe the best of this era. But until this year, he couldn’t get it to the season’s final Sunday. Like Manning, he’s finally gotten to the Super Bowl. Also like Manning, if he doesn’t win it, some people will find him lacking in some important way — such as his trying to put football into perspective.

Dungy isn’t the first coach to talk this way. There once was another outstanding coach, a dignified family man who wasn’t given to hollerin’ and cussin’, a man much beloved by his players and all who met him, a man who also understood that football isn’t life. That man was Marv Levy, the long-time coach of the Buffalo Bills.

Levy took his team to the Super Bowl four straight years, and no one else can say that. He also lost every one of those games. No one else can say that, either. It could be that in each of those four Super Bowls, the other team was simply better. It could also be that a team that is told there are bigger things in life plays that way.

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Dungy did say that the Colts are here to win the game. But after saying something about the game’s importance, he’d add that in 10 or 20 years no one would remember who was in the game.

Tell that to the fans who take out second mortgages to finance a trip to the Super Bowl, to the fans who have followed the team for 20 years waiting, dreaming, hoping and praying for this moment. It may not be literally life or death, but his players had better play like it is. And the question is: Can you do that when you’ve been told it’s not that important?